“A few nights ago, I was in the audience at an event (this) for the public who were offered the chance to ask questions of a panel of neuroscientists.

Now the questions varied, but listening to them, it seemed to me that many of them stemmed from a philosophical confusion, one that also affects many neuroscientists. This confusion is one that I’ve tackled before, but hearing neuroscience talked about from the perspective of normal people helped me see it more clearly. So:

We have two pictures in our heads. One of these is called ‘the brain’, the other we call a ‘person’/’soul’/’mind’, or more commonly we just say I, you, he and she.

The only ones who find ourselves astonishing are us. Which makes it rather suspect as a thesis. There’s nothing astonishing there to be found.Just a brain that does what it does to guarantee the survival as a species like any other animal on earth. And does a lousy job at it at that. After a mere 100.000 years or so the species is on it’s way to extinction, breaking the world record for fastest self destructing species ever.
A croc with a brain the size of a walnut outsurvives us by 200 million years, raise hands those who really beleive that homo sapiens will last a million.

“In a living brain, all kinds of interesting things are happening. Things we literally can’t begin to imagine. Because these are hard to visualize, they can’t enter the mental picture.

To picture the living brain as just a yellowy lump is like picturing Wikipedia as a disc. It’s accurate as far as it goes, but it misses the whole point. You could download Wikipedia onto a BluRay disc, and then you could describe that disc as “Wikipedia” and you wouldn’t be wrong, but Wikipedia is much more than a silver circle.

It doesn’t help much that we know that there’s more to the living brain than a yellowy lump. Yes, most of us know that the living brain is somehow responsible for thought, feeling, perception, and consciousness.

But we have no idea of how it does so, we don’t have any feel for this relationship. We agree with the idea that brain = mind, but that’s just an abstract equation. Just as most of us know that e=mc2, but only physicists understand it.”

*So in a way by defining something one way we might just be ignoring something else. Some item that could be important.So morphic thinking really is important.